In West Bank, Palestinian violence, Israeli repression...and courage from the doves | Moran

Updated July 17, 2016 at 7:55 AM;Posted July 17, 2016 at 6:30 AM

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Participants run along Israel's controversial separation barrier, which divides the West Bank from Jerusalem, in the biblical West Bank town of Bethlehem during the 4th Palestine Marathon on April 1, 2016. (Thomas Coex | AFP/Getty Images)

HEBRON, West Bank -- Nadav Bigelman stood in the blistering sun on a deserted street that forms a buffer between the tiny community of right-wing Jewish settlers here and the exasperated Palestinians who want to throw them out.

This standoff is not one among equal combatants. It is pure military domination, the powerful ruling the weak. This was once a bustling street, full of Palestinian shops and homes.

The Israeli military evicted them, over their objections, for security reasons.

"I am ashamed of my country," said Bigelman, who patrolled Hebron as an Israeli solider in 2008 and 2009. "I truly believe this occupation will end. I don't know how and when. But I truly believe that."

View the Israeli occupation of the West Bank through the eyes of a disillusioned soldier, and the first casualty is the moral clarity that Israel's supporters in America tend to form from thousands of miles away.

In this Feb. 25, 1998 photo, a Jewish settler from the settlement of Kiryat Arba kisses the grave stone of Baruch Goldstein, the U.S.-born settler who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron four years ago before being bludgeoned to death by other Palestinians. (Rick Bowmer | Associated Press)

There is plenty here on both sides to turn your stomach.

Bigelman pointed to a spot nearby where an Israeli infant in her stroller was shot in the head in 2001 by a Palestinian sniper using a telescopic sight. He chose his target deliberately, an Israeli investigation concluded, allowing the baby's mother to live.

We stopped at Goldstein's tomb in Kiryat Arba, a heavily fortified Israeli settlement just outside of Hebron. An inscription read, "He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land."

While our heads were spinning over that, a settler confronted us and said that Goldstein had done the right thing.

"If the Arabs make trouble, we kill them," said the settler, Ofer Ohana. "This is our country. We must keep them afraid."

***

Hebron sits 19 miles south of Jerusalem, and is the largest city in the occupied West Bank, with 215,000 Palestinians and fewer than 1,000 Jewish settlers. It is sacred land to Muslims and Jews, and each community has deep historic and religious roots.

Near the Jewish settlements, the Israeli military presence is overwhelming, with checkpoints everywhere guarded by soldiers who look barely older than adolescents carrying American-made M-16s.

On some streets near the settlements, Palestinians are barred altogether. The military refers to those areas as "sterile zones" as though Palestinians are some sort of germs.

An Israeli firefighter is seen inside a burnt bus in Jerusalem on April 18, 2016. A bus exploded in the heart of Jerusalem, wounding at least 15 people who appeared to have been in an adjacent bus that was also damaged. The explosion raised fears of a return to the Palestinian suicide attacks that ravaged Israeli cities a decade ago. (Mahmoud Illean | Associated Press)

In other areas, they can walk only, no cars. On still others, they can't use their front doors because the street outside is off-limits, so they use back doors or walk along rooftops to a safer zone. Long stretches of these border zones feel like ghost towns, emptied entirely to create a secure buffer.

The settlers here are more militant than most Israelis, many driven by religious zeal that brooks no political compromise.

"This is the land of the Jewish, that's all," said a middle-aged woman, an ambulance driver, who stopped us to talk. "It's right in the Torah. The idea of Palestinians is a myth. There is no nation of Palestine."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows better than to say that openly, but his policies seem animated by that same view. His determination to steadily expand the Jewish population in the West Bank snuffs out any chance for a peaceful solution to this crisis.

In the 2015 election, under pressure from the right, he stated explicitly that he opposed the creation of a Palestinian state.

"Anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel," he said.

He tried later to walk that back. But the facts on the ground are unforgiving.

Under Netanyahu, the pace of new construction has picked up, especially in the most sensitive areas.

"What I see is much more emphasis on construction in the most problematic settlements, which are the potential deal-breakers for a two-state solution," Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now's Settlement Watch project told the New York Times.

Most world leaders consider these settlements to be illegal. It is one thing for a military force to occupy land captured in war. It is quite another to move in civilians to settle that territory permanently. And that is precisely what Israel is doing.

Several large settlements are just outside Jerusalem, where low prices are a lure in the face of a housing crunch. But settlers with a hard ideological edge, like those in Hebron, are spread across the West Bank in a patchwork, all of them protected by a heavy Israeli military presence.

To build a viable Palestinian state from this seems impossible. And that is a source of despair among both Israelis and Palestinians who want to find peace.

* * *

I went to Hebron in March with my daughter, a college sophomore, as guests of a group called Breaking the Silence. It's made up of former Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank and oppose the occupation, having seen its blemishes up close.

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"I served in the military because I love Israel, and I'm doing this work because I love Israel," says Avner Gvaryahu, a spokesman for the group who served as a paratrooper in a special operations unit from 2004-2007.

So, we saw this through their lens. We studied the sins of Israelis, not those of the Palestinians.

Still, I learned quickly that a visit to Israel can give you a gut understanding of the horror of Palestinian terrorism.

One night, we met an old family friend for dinner in Jaffa, the ancient port city that is now part of Tel Aviv, strolling on the waterfront afterwards. Two nights later, a Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing rampage on that very spot, killing an American veteran, and wounding 10 more, including a pregnant woman.

We hear of these attacks all the time, sure. But it's different when it comes that close to your daughter. If you wonder why extremists win elections in Israel, that should help explain it.

A few days later, we had another close call. We sat with a tour guide near the Damascus gate in Jerusalem, discussing the region's history over a bunch of maps, and sipping Turkish coffee for a full hour in the early afternoon before stepping through the gate ourselves. That evening, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on two police officers guarding the gate. We missed the shooting by about three hours.

The next day, we got on a bus for our trip to Hebron, passing through the famous security wall that cordons off the occupied territories.

But it has dramatically reduced the number of attacks. And after our close calls, I felt unexpected sympathy for those who built it.

I wouldn't dare pretend to have a solution to this crisis. Even if Israel withdrew from the territories, the two sides would have to strike a deal on Jerusalem, and the Palestinian demand for the right to return to the homes they lost in 1948.

Israelis note that when they withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinians responded by electing Hamas in the legislative elections of 2006.

So as bad as the occupation is, it is not the only problem. Israeli repression and Palestinian violence have become the chicken and the egg, a cycle that feeds itself.

"Palestinian terrorism is horrible, and it's something I fought against and put my life on the line for Israelis over," Gvaryahu says. "But we can't forget there is violence on the Israeli side, and sometimes it's committed by Israeli soldiers. That's is also part of the dynamic."

* * *

In the closing months of his presidency in 2000 and 2001, Bill Clinton came close to brokering a peace deal. Israel agreed to withdraw from most of the West Bank, and to compensate Palestinians for what they kept by swapping land within Israel proper.

But negotiations ended in failure, with key differences remaining on Jerusalem and the right of return. Both sides said after talking in January 2001 that peace was never closer at hand.

It was a missed opportunity of historic dimensions, and now all sides agree that hopes for peace have withered.

Still, we found inspiration on both sides of this divide, a humanity that has to keep some hope alive. History is full of surprises.

In Hebron, we visited a young Palestinian man, Abed Salayma, who was building an illegal kindergarten in his neighborhood. He didn't want the young kids he knew to face the daily danger of passing through a military checkpoint on their way to a school that was farther away.

Life under the boot of Israeli military is a constant humiliation. He can't travel more than a few blocks without passing a checkpoint. Soldiers search his home for no reason, with no warrant. One time, his mother was arrested, an incident that still stings.

"Sometimes they kick all of us out of the house," he says. "We got used to it. But this time was a bit different. He grabbed me and pushed me against the wall, and my sister she was filming that and he took the phone and erased everything."

When the soldiers grabbed him, his mother resisted, so they blindfolded and handcuffed her, he said.

As the reason for all this? Mistaken identity. He was released the next day. His mother, he said, had to pay a fine of 7,000 shekels, or nearly $2,000.

The kindergarten was a small two-room building, almost ready for opening. He and his friends smuggled in paint and rugs at night, knowing they would never get permission to build this school openly.

The authorities are apparently hoping that Palestinians living this close to the settlers will abandon the neighborhood, and often deny permission for even repair work on homes, according to Salayma and the former soldiers.

Some settlers add their own touch: Graffiti spray- painted on a gate next door to the kindergarten reads, "Gas the Arabs."

The constant squeeze has succeeded. At least half of Salayma's neighbors had given up and moved.

"Basically any kind of rehab is not allowed," he said. "It's like a forced evacuation, but gradually and over time."

How many people have the kind of patience it requires to respond to this repression by building a kindergarten at night?

Some Israeli settlers in the West Bank expressed their opinion of the Palestinians with graffiti saying, "Gas the Arabs." (Tom Moran | The Star-Ledger)

The former soldiers were an inspiration, too. The settlers in Hebron know them by now, and hate them for bringing outsiders in to see what it happening. They throw rocks at their buses. They leave them waiting at checkpoints. Conservative politicians condemn them, and say they are terrorist sympathizers.

But these guys have the iron conviction of American civil rights leaders in the 1960s. They are not going to back down. Their patriotism is not about blind obedience; it is about endless work to help Israel live up to its best ideals.

"We love Israel, and we hate the occupation," Bigelman says. "But I'm fighting to change that, waking up every day to make a different reality so that my children will not have to live in the same situation.

"This place is important to me. I sleep and dream in Hebrew. This is where I was born and grew up and will die. This is my home. And I need to make my home better."

A few months after that conversation, I was safely at home and saw a story in the paper about Kiryat Arba, the settlement where our trip to Hebron began, where the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein is buried.

The girl was related to Uri Ariel, Israel's minister of agriculture and rural development, who vowed that Israel would respond by tightening its grip.

"It has to be clear that in the absence of a partner, that there will be Israeli sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea," he said. "We have to employ very tough deterrence measures, such as expulsion of families, ending monetary aid, seizing money."

The outlook, then, is for more repression, and more violence.

Which is the chicken, and which is the egg? I don't know. And in the end, does it even matter?